However you read them, the statistics tell the same story: There is significant gender discrimination in the art world, with male artists winning more prizes, having more exhibitions in commercial galleries and being paid more for their work, while museum collections are still overwhelmingly male.

Recalculating Art, a 2022 BBC documentary, revealed that the auction record for a work of art by a living (male) artist is $91 million for Jeff Koons’ Rabbit, while the highest price for a woman artist is $12.5 million, for a painting by the Glasgow-trained artist Jenny Saville. A curator told the programme that female contemporary artists have been dropped by galleries in London and New York after announcing they were pregnant, and writer Helen Gorrill, who has researched the art pay gap, revealed that women artists earn 10 pence for every £1 earned by a man.

However, recent years have brought signs of change. In 2020, the National Gallery in London held its first ever major solo exhibition by a female artist, the 17th century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Art historian Kate Hessel’s book The Story of Art Without Men brought a host of women artists back from the margins of history, and last year’s Venice Biennale redressed a long-standing imbalance when work by female artists constituted around 80 per cent of the two main curated shows.

This summer two exhibitions in Scotland are addressing the issue.

Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perceptions at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh presents 80 works by 48 female artists from 1770 to the present day, including painting, sculpture, jewellery, textiles, ceramics and illustration. Co-curated by Dovecot and the Fleming Collection, from which over half the works are taken, it includes work by artists such as Alison Watt, Joan Eardley, Jessie M. King and Phoebe Anna Traquair alongside less familiar names.

Celia Joicey, director of Dovecot Studios, said: “For me the most exciting thing is discovery, that people can come in and hear these stories. Not all the artists got the opportunity to show their work or found a route for the work to be acquired and therefore protected, promoted and preserved. It’s an opportunity to look at that ecosystem and understand how even small changes create an opportunity. This exhibition recognises that not all women were able to achieve their artistic expression in painting alone, but perhaps opportunities existed more plentifully in illustration or certain aspects of design.”

The earliest work in the show is by Katharine Read, Scotland’s first professionally trained woman artist. Born in 1723 in Dundee and trained in Paris, she went on to forge an independent career as a portrait painter in mid-18th century London, listing Queen Charlotte among her clients. The show comes right up to the present day with work by Scottish contemporary artists Sekai Machache and Rachel Maclean and includes new tapestries created at Dovecot in collaboration with Machache, Maclean and Victoria Crowe.

Scotland forged ahead with the emancipation of women in art thanks to figures such as Glasgow School of Art director Fra Newbery, who opened enrolment to equal numbers of men and women in 1885, giving rise to the movement known as the Glasgow Girls. Meanwhile, Edinburgh College of Art had its own quiet revolution, with women staff and students pioneering an all-female life class to get around the fact that it was considered improper for women to paint nudes.

Modern Scottish Women, a 2018 exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, was important in raising awareness of artists such as Dorothy Johnstone, Cecile Walton and Bessie MacNicol, while revealing some of the barriers they faced. Johnstone was an exceptional painter who was forced to resign her teaching post at Edinburgh College of Art in 1924 when she married, Walton stopped painting after her divorce in order to earn a living and MacNicol – considered one of the most talented artists of her generation – died in childbirth at the age of 34 in 1904.

Women’s careers often followed different trajectories to men’s as they navigated life experiences such as raising children or caring for relatives. An art world of predominantly male artists, teachers, curators and collectors proved less than willing to allow for these differences.

When Victoria Crowe started art school in Kingston upon Thames in 1961, she had no female teachers, although she benefited from the advice of visiting tutor Prunella Clough. When she started teaching at ECA in 1968, Crowe says she encountered a “male-dominated aesthetic which I found extremely difficult to negotiate”.

When she became pregnant with her first child in 1973, her hours were cut without consulting her. She says: “I think I must have been the first woman in the history of the ECA painting school ever to have a child. There was a patriarchal comment along the lines of ‘We felt you couldn’t quite cope’. I was so used to these ways of thinking that I didn’t challenge it.”

Crowe remembers student assessments in the 1970s when male tutors “muttered about preferred subject matter…There were worthy subjects for a woman to paint and other things which were not.” She says things improved during the 1980s and 1990s, but she remains concerned that language used to describe men’s art – words like epic, powerful, vigorous, brutal and honest – still betray a “male aesthetic”. She says: “There needs to be the understanding that everyone’s experience is relevant, and you can’t write off half the population just because their experience is ‘softer’.”

While much has changed in art schools today, Scots-Zimbabwean artist Sekai Machache, who graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2012, was well aware of the gulf between male and female. She says: “There were about two hundred women in my year in Fine Art and about ten to fifteen men, but when you look at who got the awards, the attention, the opportunities, the visibility, there was a very clear difference.”

Machache, who has been selected to represent Zimbabwe in next year’s Venice Biennale, says that the support of other artists in Scotland has been crucial to her building her career, explaining: “Because we have such supportive networks, being a woman artist in Scotland is not as difficult as it might be in other parts of the world.”

In August the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh is presenting Wonder Women, featuring three pioneering artists. Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021, was the first woman to be elected both to the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London, Wendy Ramshaw is regarded as “an icon in modern jewellery” and ceramicist Bodil Manz continues to work at the age of 80 at her home in Denmark.

Managing director Christina Jansen says the Scottish Gallery has been supporting women artists for much of its 180-year history. She explains: “We don’t often highlight it, because we’ve been showing women for so long it’s not a box we have to tick. But these are wonder women to us, exceptional women who have grafted for decades and have inspired other artists.”

She described Blackadder as “a supreme talent” and described as “utterly sexist” some of the obituaries which spoke dismissively of her paintings of cats and flowers. She goes on: “People think her career was easy, but to begin with she found it difficult to get exhibition opportunities. Her husband John Houston got instant recognition as a big talent, but it took longer for her work to be recognised.”

Overall, says Jansen, women artists today have a more level playing field, with institutions and prize organisers conscious of the need to be inclusive not just of different genders, but of other factors such as background and race. However, museum and gallery collections remain problematic, weighted heavily towards white men, an important influence on public opinion and art collectors. Some galleries have put policies in place to rebalance things, including National Galleries of Scotland, which has pledged that 55 per cent of new acquisitions will be by women.

Jansen says: “It doesn’t mean it’s easy for women now, but the audience is much more aware of women artists. The institutions have got a big headache on their hands to catch up. There is quite a big chasm between what’s happening right now and what’s reflected in the national collections.”

Scottish Women Artists, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh Jul 28 – Jan 6 2024,

Wonder Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Jul 27 – Aug 26.